Springbok legend Bryan Habana calls for global rugby season

Currently, rugby goes all year round with the northern hemisphere season running from August to July â- if you include the start of the Top 14 - while the south play between February and November.

South Africa are almost aligned with both, with their franchises competing in the United Rugby Championship and the Springboks still involved with the Rugby Championship.

There was recently talk of potentially moving the southern hemisphere tournament from its current slot of August to late-September/early-October to overlap with the Six Nations.

That was rejected for now, but Habana has suggested it is stopping rugby from aligning the two hemispheres and therefore preventing the sport's growth.

"To survive as a business, I think the legacy infrastructure of rugby needs to think differently. Rugby is a global sport in a way, in that it's played in quite a few countries, but rugby is the only global sport where the global calendar doesn't start and stop at the same time," he told the Business of Sport podcast.

"Because we have this ideology that rugby is a winter sport, rugby must remain a winter sport, but unfortunately rugby in the southern and northern hemisphere are at different times.

"We're stuck that rugby's a winter sport because that's how it always was, but if we really want to be progressive, and World Rugby has been trying, to their credit, to get a global calendar, but you can't get a global calendar if it doesn't start and stop at the same time.

"The fact that the Rugby Championship is played at a different time to the Six Nations, you can't create an international window because at some point your international players are playing international rugby at different times of the year."

Habana also suggested switching the two international windows, with the July Tests taking place in the north and the November internationals being played in the south.

"If we want to be competitive to other global sports that are much easier to understand - let's be honest rugby, if you watch it for the very first time, is a phenomenally complex sport - and you're sitting freezing at Allianz Stadium, Twickenham, on November 15, I don't want to take my kids to watch rugby like that," he said.

"Can you imagine going down to Cape Town at this time of year and experiencing 30 degree heat? Can you imagine watching rugby in June in the northern hemisphere? Sunshine, the opportunity on a concourse around the stadium, the kids loving it.

"We're stuck in this legacy ideology but I think we need a change and that requires buy-in from a whole group of stakeholders, not just World Rugby but the federations and unions as well."

Some are trying to shake up the rugby landscape with R360 perhaps the most ambitious, but that has now been delayed until 2028 at the very earliest.

"You look at what LIV Golf has done for golf, it's that positive disruption. R360 that wants to come in and do things differently, they want to positively disrupt for the right reasons, but where do you fit it in?" Habana added.

"Rugby's all year round, there's no break, there's no start and stop.

"The IPL came in, people said: 'Let's do the IPL of rugby', but India has 1.2 billion people, rugby doesn't have 1.2 billion people that it can pull on.

"How are we not losing the average rugby fan and how are we making the game easier for those that look at the game and go, 'this is physically abrasive but so difficult to understand'?"

READ MORE: Aphelele Fassi injury concern with Bulls test looming